My life took an unexpected turn awhile ago (~2004)...into a dojo! I took my son to karate and found that I didn't much like being a spectator. I started at age 46. By 50, I was wearing a black belt. At 52, I added a 2nd stripe. The blog was started to help me learn my kata. On my 55th birthday, due to hip problems, I sadly quit the martial arts. I continue to look for sports outlets and wrestle with food, fitness, and health.

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Have I mentioned what a tough time I'm having?

I can't imagine how I got so out of shape. I started running 10 days ago and found, at first, that two miles at any pace was really hard. I've run most days (well, maybe 6 times) with distances between 1 & 2.8 miles. Today, I ran 2.3 and it was just really hard. I'm not even keeping time yet since I don't want to see the numbers.

After my beating on Saturday, I came back determined to the Monday night class. Informally known as Legs Night. We work on some cardio with a bunch of kicks. Near the end, we were doing a left front kick, axe kick, left round house, spin around right hook kick. Not pretty. But I stayed with it except for the pushups where, I'm still not in the game. We did a pyramid to 20 (first 5, then 10, then 15, then 20) and I probably hit 60% of them. The pushup position makes my feet hurt!

But the march towards street defense and MMA continues. Not a kata in sight. And last night, it was side shoulder grab. Gone is the Kenpo approach in which you did an outside block and a roundhouse. The new approach: Grip his bicep with the hand closest to him, then palm to the face or neck, elbow to the face or elblow and a quick knee strike to the body (groin).

We also did the side head grab. The kenpo (old) approach had been to step around, strike with the heel of both hands to the groin and kidneys, reach up to the scruff of the neck while bringing the heel of the other hand up into his neck, and then a groin strike. Now, we grab the far arm from around his back (I doubt the realism of this since it can be hard to reach if the person is bigger) but then stand up, arching back and pushing forward into him with your hip, light strike to the back of the near knee while throwing one arm around his neck into a choke, then step slowly backwards while putting up the other hand to grab the bicep and put him to sleep (or force him to tap out). del.icio.us

1 comment:

Hey, I wrote up a comment at some point and lost track of what I was doing.

How's the transition going? I continue to be very interested in the shift. The question that keeps coming to mind is how qualified is your instructor to be teaching this new curriculum? I'm not trying to suggest anything at all. The question just comes from thinking about a Kenpo instructor suddenly changing curriculums. Is he simply adapting his Kenpo training to an MMA environment?